Is the Market Leader deal with NRT a good one?

Inman News has a story of Market Leader (now owned by Trulia) having entered in to a multi-year deal with NRT, which as over 41,000 agents, to provide a white-labled version of their product at a “modest” fee.

Not sure what they mean by “modest”. When Market Leader did a deal with Keller Williams back in 2011 they announced that 80,000 of KW agents would pay $15/ month for “eEdge”. Not sure how much of that was going back to Market Leader either. But somehow I think this NRT deal is even more leveraged to the back-side. Meaning the up-front fee is minimal, and conversion to a “premium version” is where they make money.

Market Leader has similar deals with other Realogy brands, Century 21 and Better Homes & Gardens. NRT, as you may know, is operated by Realogy.

These freemium (or close to freemium) deals are tough. Agents are fiercely independent. It’s up to the vendor to do the leg work of first getting adoption and then converting them to a a premium version. Based on my experience the franchisors are going to little or next to nothing to help out.

It would be interesting to see what type of conversion percentages they have with each brand. The article mentions Trulia having 25K “premium subscribers”, which based on my math, and agent count, is 27% of their existing deals. Based on my experience even half of a 27% conversion rate is pretty amazing (and a good deal). My guess it would be Keller Williams first and C21 and BH&G a distant second and third (as a percentage of premium upgrades). But I do think the NRT deal with be closer in conversion percentage with KW than C21 or BH&G.